I have written the original blog here that I'm cross-posting here on Steem!
When I first started in the IT field, I didn't know exactly what I'd be getting into from a time management perspective. Over the years as much as I tried and tried, the near-infinite list of tasks and things to do seemed to grow ever longer. I knew I had to do something to help both myself, and my team make progress on making IT work more efficiently. I discovered a book by Tom Limoncelli called: Time Management for System Administrators, and it was a logical evolutionary step for us.
Taking a step back, the place I was working for had a strong ethic of improving efficiency wherever possible. This really clicked with me, as it gets exhausting solving the same mundane issues over and over. After applying some of the principles from that book, we started noticing it wasn't just our users who were eating up our time. In fact, because our company and infrastructure grew faster than our IT staff, we were battling the hardware and software itself to make sure it was running efficiently. We were developing a daily routine that ended up taking too much time, and didn't actually help being blindsided by problems.
When I first started I'd setup a Cacti server that monitored a few key bits of infrastructure. It worked ok, and even helped track down a few issues, but with growth it seemed clunky and wasn't giving us insight into the environment we needed to keep things going. I then setup a nagios system for us that allowed us to not only know what is going on with the system metrics, but know what services are doing as well. We could see what was happening with applications and their underlying hardware. We could get proof a system needed more resources, before it crashed.
It wasn't just the tools we implemented, but the philosophy of looking for problems before they became problems that completely transformed our work. Downtime wasn't an issue because we could then plan for redundancy, and be able to tell in real time, if the redundancy worked. We even got to the point, to where we would call our users before they had an issue to deal with problems. It made the whole process of IT work much more managable. The cost of IT issues on the business were drastically lowered, and everyone in our team was a lot happier.
I strongly believe that being proactive is one of the best ways to save time, money and hassle for any business. One of the very reasons that Cypher Software exists today is to help businesses become more proactive in their IT infrastructure by monitoring and alerting on potential issues.